


the devil's in the details (but you got a friend in me)

by tigerlilycorinne



Series: AUgust 2020 Short Fic [4]
Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: AU-gust 2020, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angel Newt, Angels and Demons AU, Demon Credence, Kinda, M/M, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:07:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25614085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigerlilycorinne/pseuds/tigerlilycorinne
Summary: “I am an angel, but I’m not–” The man winced. “I’m not a demon-hunter, if that’s what you think of me.”“If that’s what I think of you?” Credence echoed incredulously. “Of course that’s what I think of you. Your case isglowing.”The angel looked at him, and then to his case, and then ran a long-fingered hand through his red hair, golden in the setting sun. Satan willing, Credence would stall this strange angel long enough for the sun to set completely.“Actually,” said the beautiful angel, “I was going to ask you to get in the case.”Or: Where Credence thinks Newt is trying to kill him when all Newt is trying to do is save a very handsome demon from the angels whoaretrying to kill him.
Relationships: Credence Barebone/Newt Scamander
Series: AUgust 2020 Short Fic [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1856617
Comments: 6
Kudos: 63
Collections: AUgust 2020





	the devil's in the details (but you got a friend in me)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Taylor Swift's "peace"

The man in the street is pretty. Too pretty. Beautiful. 

In a very angelic way.

In a way that makes Credence’s skin crawl. His blood boil. His heartbeat kick. Danger, danger, danger.

The man is tall and thin, with bright curls that make him inherently cheerful. If Credence focuses hard enough, he can see the freckles dotting the long-fingered hands that peek out of the electric blue coat this man has on, catching eyes.

That’s not what caught Credence’s eyes.

What caught Credence’s eyes is the way the sun plays off of the air around this redhead when he moves, the glint of his hair, the light that catches in his eyes. It’s like he _glows._ It’s like the world is spinning around this man, right here. It’s like there’s a halo above his head. It’s like if Credence focuses very hard, he can see the outline of white, feathered wings blooming from where the man’s shoulder blades are beneath this bright blue coat. 

It’s like there’s “beautiful” written in the man’s smile.

It’s like there are rows of weaponry especially made to “defend” angels from demons like Credence in that case with “ _Newt Scamander”_ scrawled on the side of it. As if the demons aren’t driven into the gutters, gorging on blood and life only because they must, because they’ve been hunted out of where they drain the life from forests, far from civilizations. They didn’t become a threat to humanity until they had no choice.

Demons inspire disorder and drain morals from anyone they’re near– but curiously, only from humans. If they’d just been left in peace… but the angels will never give them peace, and Credence, Credence needs to get as far away from this angel as he can. 

Demons aren’t allowed in hell anymore. It’s too full. They were meant to be up above, eating away the old parts of the world. Hell wasn’t meant to hold so many demons, and they aren’t letting any new demons in anymore, but he’s heard of contacts someone very desperate might contact to sneak them across the border.

He’s desperate. So desperate. He never learned to fight, or control any of it. Instead, his animalistic hunger reaches out in tendrils and drains people of their life hungrily, clumsily, horribly. His mother hated him. Tossed him right out of hell. Because he wanted to sleep with a man. Because he wanted to look for a forest instead of a human. Because he wanted to be something good.

Demons aren’t good.

If Credence wanted to learn to be good, he could go find himself an angel and pray to ‘ _God_ ’ that the angel wouldn’t slaughter him on sight. If he wanted to abandon Satan, Mary Lou said, Credence could go slum it up in the world above, _this much_ closer to heaven. 

Credence wanted back down. He wanted back down _right now._

He wove through the streets as smoothly as he could, trying not to draw eyes, pulling the brim of his hat lower on his head. Ignoring the way someone coughed in his wake, another tripped, another gasped and clutched at her heart, another pulled out a knife with a shout. 

Credence would be no match for an angel who smiled like the sun. The brighter the all, the shorter your life, they all said. This joke of a life Credence had, this undead life. They didn’t have a word for it, existing without living. It seemed fitting for them to simply not have a word. One step away from not existing at all. Credence would see the dark, gray-black stain on a wall or sidewalk and know a demon became ash right on that spot.

Down the street, papers in his hands, walking like he had somewhere to be. Normal. Easy-going. Human. Inconspicuous. 

He couldn’t bear it; it looked over his shoulder.

“ _Satan’s sake,_ ” he hissed under his breath.

It was easy to spot the bright blue coat trailing him, weaving through the people behind him, all of them tripping and cursing behind him, cured of their pain as soon as the angel passed them by. Waves of people a little worse, a little better, bad and good, one after the other. 

“Devil’s–!” He’d looked over his shoulder too long– he’d run right into someone. “Oh– no– I’m so, so sorry.” He knew before he looked down. He’d been so hungry. He wasn’t hungry anymore. And the woman lying at his feet was dead, her black hair spilling out around her head like a dark halo, her papers scattered over the ground; a mirror of Credence with his dark waves of hair and his perfectly ordered papers that had nothing on them. “I truly, I–” he could feel his heartbeat pumping with the new energy even as remorse engulfed. 

“Demon,” he heard a soft, musical voice whisper behind him. The voice of an angel. 

He didn’t stop to fix up the woman the way he normally would. 

He ran.

He didn’t know New York City very well. He’d barely ventured from the basement of an abandoned building marked _New Salem Philanthropic Society_. He turned at random, and he ran until his lungs burned, and then he kept running. He thought it was a joke. His whole existence was a joke, and there was no better joke than that he had breath and a heartbeat but, as everyone never stopped reminding him, no soul or life.

 _He ran_. 

He turned and nearly ran into a mailbox, having to turn his body to avoid it, focusing on not falling flat, feeling the tug of the angel hunting him yanking at his very core, and looked up as he continued to run.

And he halted.

_A dead end._

Of course, he’d run into a dead end. It was horrid. It waslike a nightmare. Credence was the sort of thing that haunted other people’s nightmares; this brick wall in front of him and the angel thudding across the stone street behind him was the stuff of Credence’s own.

He stood there for a moment, terrified, and then another footstep sounded, slower this time, as if the man was creeping up on him. Didn’t he know demons could feel angels’ proximity pounding through their blood? 

_Danger, danger, danger,_ his heartbeat screamed. _Trapped, trapped, trapped,_ his mind yelled back.

In a senseless rush of terror, he dashed for the wall. _Just two seconds more, let me exist. Just these last few yards will be mine before he takes those, too._

It didn’t matter, those few yards. 

The bricks were filthy, speckled with dirt, orange-brown-red near the ground with what must have been piss. Credence pressed himself against it anyway, his back to the scratching stones, his coat catching on the jutting, rough bricks. 

The man was a few feet from him now, late afternoon sun on his curls. If Credence had just run a little longer. If the sun had just set a little earlier. If the man had been a little slower. 

“Demon,” the man said, slowing his steps. Credence watched wildly for the long fingers to stray towards the weapons case. “What is your name?”

“ _Demon_ ,” Credence answered. Names had power. He would not give his up. Even if everything was a joke, even his name. _Credence_. As if forever branding him someone who would always yearn to be better than his nature would ever let him be. His hands scrabbled uselessly against the brick, his claws bursting through his fingers in his panic, horns pushing their wild power through his glamour. “That’s all you need to know.”

“Please, I’m here to help you, Demon,” the angel murmured, voice trembling on the edge right between speaking and whispering. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

Credence almost laughed. The angel looked so _good_. In a moral way. And in the physical appearance way. And in the energy way. People had tossed around stories of stupid angels who trusted demons to let them get close enough. They said drain an angel of their energy, and you’d get yourself a normal life. A human one. 

This angel, he could almost fool Credence into believing he was one of those idiots. He had the kind of eyes that made him want to trust the heavenly creature.

The man moved forward, one step, another… crouching. As if ready to pounce, except with his hands out in front of him. Empty, open. 

Credence heard himself whimper. The long fingers seemed to glow in the fading sunlight. “Get away from me,” he whispered. “I’ll– I’ll drain you. _I’ll drain you_. I _will_.” He tried to sound like he meant it, but he hadn’t gotten a good look at the man before, when he was running away. Now that he looked at this man, his convictions wavered. _Newt Scamander,_ read his case. Likely the angel’s name. “ _Newt Scamander,_ ” he hissed, to emphasize his hostility. To convince the angel. To convince himself. Both.

The man’s face was not just the angel kind of pretty. The man’s face, here, had _character_. Caring, kind. Earnest. Full lips parted in focus. Eyebrows drawn together in what was a well-crafted mask of concern. The light flickered around him as Credence spoke the words on the case, confirming that this was his name. Credence had never met an angel who left out their name. It was naive, overly-trusting. But the angel looked his age– give or take a couple decades, which was nothing to centuries on both their sides. Credence was two. Centuries. And a couple loose decades.

“Will you?” Newt Scamander said, his mouth twitching like it might smile all on its own. “Would you like to drain me?”

“ _Yes,_ ” Credence hissed, his hunger for life growing in time with his reluctance to take it. Newt Scamander’s voice was _beautiful_ , and the edges of it were frayed like an angel who spent too long on Earth without the touch of the heavens every night. “You better run.”

“You’re in danger,” Newt Scamander murmur-whispered, as if Credence hadn’t even spoken. Credence watched him creep forward a little closer, his hands still out. His case was still in reach– _Newt Scamander_ , carved in scrawling letters on brown, stiff material, the feel of magic spilling out from it. Light, gentle, sweet magic from the heavens. “Come with me, before the angels get here.” 

Credence laughed then, for real. “You’re an angel.” Magic from the heavens was the most dangerous to demons, the most harmful. 

“Yes,” Newt Scamander conceded, which made Credence blink. He’d expected the accusation to be denied, however obvious the truth was. 

Newt Scamander leaned over, still crouching. Credence watched in awe as the wings on the angel’s back solidified from their noncorporal state, the faint glowing lines that Credence could see if he squinted filling in to become white and feathered, huge and strong. Flesh and bone. Light and muscle. They were beautiful. He’d never seen an angel’s wings up close, though he’d seen them from a distance, when one had flown after Modesty and thrown her to the ground. 

Was this another ploy for his trust? What did Newt Scamander even need his trust for? 

“I am an angel, but I’m not–” The man winced. “I’m not a demon-hunter, if that’s what you think of me.”

“ _If that’s what I think of you_?” Credence echoed incredulously. “Of course that’s what I think of you. Your case is _glowing_.”

The angel looked at him, and then to his case, and then ran a long-fingered hand through his red hair, golden in the setting sun. Satan willing, Credence would stall this strange angel long enough for the sun to set completely. 

“Actually,” said the beautiful angel, “I was going to ask you to get in the case.”

“It’s a cage,” Credence said dully. “You’re a blood-letter.” Blood-letters were whispered stories: angels that had gone bad, who captured demons without killing them and sold their blood for the most potent of poisons. Terror dripped into his every vein, possessed every inch of his body. Credence screamed. “ _Help_!” 

“No–!” the angel shouted, raising his voice for the first time, “No, please–” and he flared his wings out, blocking the rest of the darkening street from Credence’s view. “Demon, Demon, please, they’ll hurt you.”

“I’m not shouting for the angels,” Credence gasped out, and shrieked shrilly again. “I’m screaming for anyone but you.” He screamed again.

Newt Scamander’s eyes grew wide, and his breathing quickened. “Please,” the angel said weakly, as if the screams themselves were harming him, “Demon. Look.” He grabbed the brown case by its handle and tore open the clasps, wrenching the case open. 

Credence screamed again. It was so _bright_. Like what he imagined heaven itself might be like. It was light, light, light. There weren’t tools, but he hadn’t expected attack weapons anymore, he’d amended his horror-bound imagination to a glowing, shimmering cage.

This wasn’t that, either. When his eyes adjusted to the light, he could see a ladder, leading down, down, down. 

Into a forest.

“What do you want from me?” he whispered. He sounded fearful, he thought. Or worshipful. Fear and God were synonymous. 

“Let me help you,” pleaded the angel. The cold bit at Credence’s cheeks, the warm air of the case soothing him. The forest called for him. The life he was meant to take, the old and the weak, the ones ready to become food for the scavengers. The hunger and ferocity he was supposed to inspire, the violence. Not in people, but in natural predators. “Let me save you.”

“You could throw me in yourself.” Credence’s heart ached for the forest… but: “I don’t want to _die_ ,” he hissed, clenching his fists so tight, he could feel the sting of his nails biting his palms. 

The angel shook his head. The curls on his forehead tumbled over each other, bright and unruly. “I can’t until you choose to come with me.” The angel was close enough to kill him now. Close enough to kiss. Close enough to count his freckles and see the plea in his eyes and almost believe it. “I’ll be right there with you. I won’t let them hurt you, I promise.”

“ _Them_?” They were both whispering now, the angel facing, his wings still spread, obscuring the rest of the world, surrounding Credence in soft, white, feathers, their foreheads nearly touching. The case sat open between them, on the ground. 

Credence could no longer remember when Newt Scamander had stood up. He could no longer Mary Lou’s face, telling him trust was a disease; it was nearly a hundred years ago. He could no longer remember thinking this was just another angel. He could no longer remember that the speed of his heart meant danger and not something else. 

For a moment, he could no longer remember they were angel and demon.

“The other angels,” the angel said with his full lips, and Credence remembered. 

Newt Scamander had stood after opening a case of dangerous magic, baited with a forest Credence was programmed in his poisonous blood to ache for. Mary Lou had told him never to trust because Modesty had trusted, and she was dead now, really dead. This _was_ another angel; he had his wings out, for Satan’s sake. The blood singing in his heart was singing run, _run, run_. And it sang for beauty and want, the kind of want Credence had never had been able to squash, rising in the coiling pit of his stomach and his withered, black heart, and in the tingle of his fingertips and between his legs. His demon and his demon’s demon, calling out to him all at once. Hunger for love and kisses and sweet release; hunger for the sole exhilaration of survival.

Credence reached out a hand and brushed a hand over Newt Scamander’s beautiful face. “You’re so beautiful,” he whispered, watching a pink tongue swipe across the perfect lips. Had he thought the blue coat was electric? He was wrong. Nothing was electric if not the blue of this man’s eyes. “So beautiful, I almost believe you. I’m almost sorry.” 

He called his third hunger to his fingertips, the hunger for food, for light. For sucking the life out of someone else. 

“ _Newt Scamander!_ ” Someone bellowed down the street. “ _Kill_ the bastard! They’re monsters! Don’t _save_ them!”

... _What?_

The empty void aching to be fed froze in Credence’s veins before he released it into the angel’s body.

Newt Scamander’s wings hitched higher. “They’re not monsters!” He yelled. He looked at Credence. He was so, _so_ beautiful. Credence wanted to cry for how beautiful this man was. “ _Get in,_ ” Newt Scamander whispered, “ _Please_. It’s not a glamored cage.”

And then Newt Scamander the strange angel turned, closing his wings for a moment to avoid brushing against Credence– _I wouldn’t mind,_ Credence found himself thinking– and faced the other angels. Newt Scamander spread his wings once more, as if to shield Credence (maybe, just _maybe_ he _was_ shielding Credence) but before he did, Credence caught sight of several bright, glowing figures, glimmering weapons in their hands, sending fever-screams into Credence’s blood.

“They’re not dangerous!” Newt Scamander shouted across the street at them, gesturing behind his back frantically, his arm bent awkwardly to dip backward behind his wing. “They’re only trying to live! They’re just hungry!”

The angels were getting closer. 

“Demon,” Newt said in a shaky voice, and laughed breathlessly to himself without humor. “You never did tell me your name, did you? Well, _Demon_ , I suppose. Get in. Close it over you, pull down the ladder. Break it. It’ll break the portal.”

The others ran closer.

Credence’s blood felt like it would burst out of his skin, burning with the proximity of so many angels. 

Closer.

“What about you?” he found himself whispering, watching the beautiful angel’s face.

Newt Scamander’s face fell, and Credence found it in his empty heart to wish for something– anything– to cheer this angel up. This incredibly good angel, but in the best of ways. “I’ve been saving demons for years,” he said. “This was bound to happen. Even angels fall.”

Credence looked up, into Newt’s face. _Newt_ , he found himself thinking, _an animal_. Someone destined to love nature, the homeland of demons, just as the name _Credence_ condemned Credence to long for goodness he could never fulfill. 

The angels’ footsteps kicked in his ribcage. They were so, so close. Too close. They wouldn’t both have time to get down the ladder.

Credence looked into the bright, bright beam of the case, open before him on the ground.

And he jumped in. 

White filled his vision, even though his eyes were closed, burning brightly through his eyelids. The branches would hurt when he crashed through them. Credence knew, at least, that when he hit the ground, he’d die. Newt would have no reason to stay behind. At least Newt would follow him and tear the ladder and continue being better than heaven.

Credence fell through the air and curled himself into a ball, bracing for the impact of hard wooden branches, trees he’d once ached for. Trees he still ached for, but not like this.

It never came.

Something caught the back of his coat, turning him easily in the air. Someone caught him up in their arms. They weren’t falling anymore.

Credence didn’t want to open his eyes. He didn’t want to look down. He didn’t have to, anyway. He smiled, and held tighter. His heart beat wildly, his blood sang, and he didn’t mind it one bit.

Newt Scamander, the strange, beautiful angel, was flying him home.

**Author's Note:**

> I really want to write more parts to this, maybe... if anyone else wants to read that, I might? Let me know with a comment, or on Tumblr @[tigerlilycorinne-drarry-me](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/tigerlilycorinne-drarry-me) or on my main @[tigerlilycorinne](https://tigerlilycorinne.tumblr.com/)


End file.
